Tuesday, November 24, 2015

The Consequences of Desire - Dennis Hathaway

Awfully
good writing about awful people. This can be said of the Flannery
O'Connor Award for Short Fiction's namesake as well as the award's
1992 recipient. Commonality beyond these two broad distinctions,
however, if they exist, are hard to find

The
late Ms. O'Connor's style follows one of the basic commandments of
good writing: she shows us what's happening. She doesn't tell us
Grandmother is a domineering, self-centered hypocrite. We get to
watch the old gal in action, bossing her unattractive family around
to suit her fancy. In his winning collection of stories, The
Consequences of Desire,
we see little outward action involving Dennis Hathaway's characters.
But inside their heads, oh, mercy. We're immersed in the
kaleidoscopic battling of their thoughts and emotions.

Themewise
the stories could hardly be further apart—on the surface. O'Connor,
while keeping obvious signposts of her Roman Catholicism deeply
camouflaged in subtlety, pushes her characters to extremes of
happenstance, including death, where their mortal actions can bring
them heavenly grace. Religion or spiritual faith are absent from
Hathaway's tales. His self-absorbed characters invariably find their
dreams, their hopes, their desires coming up short or crashing to
pieces when they find themselves face to face with stark reality.
Teenager Justine feels the dream she's had most of her life of
becoming a private eye blink out when she loses her nerve tailing a
mysterious stranger into a rough part of town.

The
characters' awfulness is different, too. O'Connor wrote about
cripples, criminals, freaks and nitwits—people she lived among in
her native rural Georgia, a type that came to be known in literary
circles as “southern grotesque.” Hathaway's people are
Californians, mostly middle class--artisans and professionals—most
of them unlikable in a sleeker, sorrier way. Because of her youthful
innocence Justine is the least repugnant of the bunch. The sorriest
is Paul Westerly, a mediocre architect who flees inwardly to insanity
when his more talented former assistant surpasses him professionally.

Of
the eleven stories in The
Consequences of Desire
the most engaging for me was the title story. This in part because
the two main characters get equal time with us. Viewpoints in the
other stories are limited to one, and in all but one the character
who lets us into his head is male. And these males spend more energy
silently dithering than executing. They are all Hamlet. The man in
The
Consequences of Desire,
the story, has a tad more chutzpah than the others:

He
stood in the shadow of an awning, watching a woman in a green dress
waiting to cross the street, and in a characteristic way he calmly
considered opposing courses of action—stepping into the sunlight
and calling her name, remaining in the shadow until she crossed the
street and faded from sight. Although he hadn't seen her for years he
was certain she was the girl he had marched with down
this very street, the girl whose hand he had held while singing an
anthem whose words he didn't care to recall, the girl he had lived
with briefly in a commune deep in the woods. She was heavier, he
thought, and softer than the girl whose image was that of a fairy
dancing in the firelight, dark and lithe and uninhibited. He observed
that her face looked slightly drawn, as if by permanent tension and
anxiety, and finally he abandoned the shadow, reached out to touch
her arm and say, “You remember me, don't you?”

Comes
the next paragraph, we're in her
head:

She
stared at him. The street corner, the parallelogram of sunlight that
formed an enclosure in which they stood, the blue metal rectangle
bearing the words TELEGRAPH
and AVE,
the handful of strangers waiting for the green permission of “Walk”
all receded beyond the memory of an intimacy that took sudden and
insistent possession of her senses, like a loud noise or peculiar
odor. She stared at smooth cheeks rounded by the breadth of a smile.
The face was unfamiliar but the voice tapped on the door to a room
full of embarrassing secrets. She felt a sudden pressure behind her
eyes.

If
you hear the strains of that melancholy Dan
Fogelberg
Christmas tune cuing up in your head, they did in mine, too, as I
accompanied these long ago lovers on their cautiously modulated steps
of reminiscence and re-acquaintance toward the inevitable room where
the tentative flare of a mutually tepid curiosity flickers out. What
gives this story a depth not shared by the others is the back and
forth between his point of view--his emotions, his memories, his
calculations--and hers.

Of
the four professionals who reviewed this work, only one seemed
enthusiastic, which I find odd considering its award cachet. Perhaps
even recognized excellent writing needs a tony marketing boost—a
blurb or two from Franzen/DeLillo ilk, and free review copies for the
Kakutanis and Corrigans—to stoke a buzz among readers who rely on
assurance from name-brand taste arbiters.

The
Consequences of Desire, despite
its neglect, is still in print—paperback and Kindle. It's published
by The University of Georgia Press. This alone might have been
off-putting to three of the four professionals who reviewed the book.
One, I suspect, only skimmed the stories. Whoever wrote the single
paragraph for Publisher's Weekly completely missed the point of the
title story.

In
my opinion only Booklist did justice to Hathaway's work--at least
this apparently abbreviated review, which is all I could find in an
online search: “Hathaway is attuned to the vast distances between
people even as they share a bed, a conversation, or a drink. He takes
exact measurements of the chasm between fancy and fact, fears and
longings, the mundaneness of reality and the tempting illogic of
fantasy . . . These are perceptive, enticing, and complexly
structured stories that illuminate the gap between thought and
communication, the void between wealth or beauty and spiritual
clarity.”

Hathaway

The
eleven stories in this collection comprise Hathaway's sole canon of
published fiction—again, this according to my online search. For
the past nine years Dennis Hathaway has been president of the
Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, a Los Angeles community activist
organization he helped found in 2006. Righteous work, no doubt about
that, but if he has given up creating literature, for which he has a
rare gift, that would be a damned dirty shame.

Nice review. Are you the Mathew Paust who worked at the Times-Democrat newspaper in Davenport, Iowa in the 70's? (No, I'm not a private detective representing the estate of a long-forgotten relative who has bequeathed you a pot of money)

Well, in that case, Dennis, piss off! And if there's another one of me running around pretending to have worked for what is now (I understand) just The Quad City Times (if it still exists at all) then there must be some truth to the concept of doppelgänging. I was delighted to find your book, and even more delighted to find it had won the Flannery O'Connor award, and even MORE delighted reading it. As my blog is devoted one way or another to crime, the only crime I can think of in this instance is that you're evidently no longer writing fiction. I was happy to see, tho, your righteous activities with billboard blight. Speaking of part of that word, btw, Bill O'Keefe sends his regards via me. We keep in touch. He's retired, too, living in Tampa Bay. We should find some excuse to get together--while we still can. Great hearing from you. - Matt